Issues with the profile?

The ESSID of the network I was trying to connect to was 33C3. For some reason, I forgot to put this into quotes in the netctl profile so it would simply not be activated and keep falling back to some other default profile. I figured this out by instructing netctl to tell me more about what it is doing with the environment variable NETCTL_DEBUG like so:

$> NETCTL_DEBUG=true sudo netctl-auto switch-to wlp2s0-33C3

This way I learned that wpa_cli was trying different networks and eventually seemed to fallback to the default. So I ran wpa_cli manually to see which options it tried:

$> sudo wpa_cli -i wlp2s0 list_networks

This listed me all familiar networks plus one that was named 3\xc3 which lead me to suspect that something with the ESSID must be wrong.